WHISNANT: Perpetuating misunderstanding

Bill Maher does the progressive movement a disservice when he mischaracterizes Islam by Gray Whisnant | Oct 08 2014 | 10/08/14 12:57am

Bill Maher has made it his calling card over the years to foment controversy by making what he calls politically incorrect arguments. While sometimes this tendency positions him as a brave dissenter against the conventional wisdom, other times Maher just gets it wrong in ugly ways. On a recent edition of his show Real Time with Bill Maher, the comedian ripped into liberals for their refusal to criticize the Islamic world for its supposed attacks on liberal values like freedom of speech and religion. According to Maher, the Muslim world as a whole has too much in common with ISIS and as such, multiculturalism and tolerance should draw the line at acceptance of what he labels an Islamic worldview. The following week, Maher went even further by comparing Muslims to a murderous mafia that issues hits on dissenters. Sadly, Mahers characterization of what he calls the Muslim world is a reactionary break from the Enlightenment tradition he claims to champion and instead gives progressive cover to the all-too-real problems of Islamophobia and racism.

With recent beheading videos from ISIS shown on loop in the media, old tropes like Mahers about the unique savagery of the Muslim world have been given new life. As much as alarmist and xenophobic media coverage seems to suggest otherwise, 72 percent of Muslims worldwide believe violence against civilians is never justified. As New York Times columnist Nick Kristof pointed out in the segment with Maher, claiming Muslims are uniquely inclined towards violence on a global scale recalls many arguments about African-Americans that white racists have made over the years. If Maher can recognize that blaming a persons socially constructed race for violence in his or her American community is bigoted, its frustrating that he cannot make the same leap for adherents of a religion in a part of the world that has experienced exceptional external violence and war in recent decades.

None of this is to say that all violence in the Middle East is an illusion, just that its scale and causes are widely misunderstood. A brief survey of the history of the Middle East helps dissect some of the nuances of the rise of Islamic fundamentalism and the ways in which it has been unwittingly enabled by Western powers. The most famous example is the Iranian coup of 1953. Angered by democratically-elected Prime Minister Mossadeghs attempts to nationalize the oil industry, the CIA and British MI6 fed on domestic turmoil and helped engineer a coup that installed the Shah as pro-Western absolute monarch. Over the following decades leading up to the 1979 Revolution, American intelligence officials helped SAVAK, the Iranian secret police, torture and imprison leftist opponents of the regime that left political Islam as one of the few remaining outlets for political dissent. When we criticize the Iranian regime today for its nightmarish security apparatus and political repression, we should remember what role the United States had in enabling it and steering the country away from democratic progress and towards theocracy.

A similar story of Islamic fundamentalism fueled by Western malfeasance can be seen in Afghanistan. Today, Afghanistan is viewed as the great failed state of the Middle East and a hotbed of jihadists. As Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek points out, Afghanistan approximately thirty years ago was a country with a strong secular tradition and only saw growth in political Islam after being drawn into global power struggles first by the Soviet Union and then by the United States. As iek pointed out in the context of the Ukrainian crises of the past year, it is the aggressive attempt to export liberal permissiveness that causes fundamentalism to fight back vehemently and assert itself. The more the West misguidedly tries to impose its liberal values (and access to oil fields) through force and violent disruption, the further away from realization of those values we will be.

So are there any alternatives to Mahers simplistic condemnation of the religion of 1.5 billion mostly nonviolent people and an equally unsatisfying moral relativism? As American citizens, there is only so much we can do alone to bring about the change wed like to see in the developing world, as history is rife with examples of Westerners swooping in to civilize non-white people to disastrous effects. That said, we can and should call out the policies of our own governments that are antithetical to our values and that history has shown will only incite more violence and hate. While condemning ISIS for its unspeakable brutality, we should simultaneously question why one of the United Statess closest allies is a Saudi Arabian government that beheaded eight people over just the past month to fight them. Violence is violence, and it is worthy of opposition no matter what its ideological source. In seeing nuance and studying history, we can move beyond a limited notion of tolerance towards something far more satisfying: understanding.

Gray Whisnant is an Opinion Columnist for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at g.whisnant@cavalierdaily.com.

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WHISNANT: Perpetuating misunderstanding